In the Rosary Garden

by Nicola White

  ‘We can’t discuss individual cases, of course – let’s go to our audience. Sir!’ he said, pointing into the crowd.

  A strained-looking man with a side parting stood up.

  ‘I have fourteen children,’ he paused, ‘and each one is a precious gift from God.’

  ‘Is your wife with you tonight?’ Mary called out. A twitch of a smile moved on Gay’s lips.

  ‘As it happens, she’s at home…’ The sound of female laughter drowned out the rest of his words, and Gay pointed at someone else, leaving the man stranded, with no choice but to sit back down. A woman in a yellow tweed jacket stood up and looked at Ali. She had a tight, excited look about her.

  ‘I have a daughter just your age, and do you know, I’m terrified for her. Terrified. There’s so much pressure on her to have sex – from the media, from boys, from other girls even. Tell me, as a young one yourself, how do you stand firm?’

  Ali was at a loss. She tried to imagine what Mary would say.

  ‘Maybe I don’t.’ A slight gasp came from the audience, and Gay wheeled around to look at her. ‘Maybe it’s not just about girls saying no, but about ways of not bringing an unwanted child into the world. Ways that are more effective than what we were taught.’

  ‘Promiscuity is hardly a solution!’ shouted Beasley.

  The woman with the question raised her voice. ‘Well I’m glad my daughter isn’t a little slut like you,’ she said.

  ‘Ah now! There’s no need…’ said Gay, but the audience was in uproar again, everyone talking at once, Mary and Dr. Beasley leaning forwards to speak into their microphones. Ali caught sight of the monitor to one side of the stage and her own face was filling it – stricken eyes, flaming cheeks.

 

  Swan sat in his mother’s front room, disbelieving his eyes and ears. His mother was on her knees at the side of his chair, mopping up the tea he had knocked over when Alison Hogan had appeared on the television screen.

  ‘Leave it!’ he said again.

  ‘Don’t be at me. It’s my rug and I’ll save it if I want.’

  Her gray head bobbed by his left elbow. He could either argue or listen to what that little rag was saying about the case, and he should know by now that his mother was immune to argument. The innocence of the Hogan girl’s face was amazing, given her lust for the spotlight. Two days ago she’d sworn to him that she wouldn’t talk to any more journalists and he’d believed her, and now here she was opinioning away about the state of the nation. She was trouble.

  Just as well he’d sent Considine down to the country to look into the girl’s past, that other baby. With any luck it would turn out to be nothing, bad dreams, imagination.

  His mother exhaled an oof as she got up and threw the dishtowel over onto the table, where the remains of their dinner still lay.

  ‘I’ve a lot of time for that Mary O’Shea,’ she said, settling back into her chair.

  Swan grunted assent. His mother’s appreciation was probably of a different flavour to his own. That night he met her briefly at the theatre, he’d fluffed it. Words had failed him. He was still amazed that someone as elegant as Elizabeth had agreed to marry him, but Mary O’Shea, she was in another league entirely.

  The screen was filled with Ali Hogan’s face, a glisten of tears in her eyes, the whipped look of her. Hard to fake that.

  ‘She’s not getting an easy ride, your girl. Did you see that aul’ bitch in the audience go for her?’

  ‘No one made her go on,’ said Swan, ‘I’m not sure the nuns at her school will appreciate it.’

  ‘Pity about them.’ Mrs. Swan took up the paper, folded it to the crossword page. ‘The spare bed is still made up if you want to stay. Save you going back to an empty house’

  ‘Ach, I shouldn’t,’ said Swan, but his attention had returned to the screen.

 

  Mary was saying how we would do well to listen to young people rather than old men. Doctor Beasley got offended at being referred to as an old man and started tugging at his tie.

  ‘Eh – eh – eh – ’ he said, stuttering to find a gap in Mary’s tirade. Gay held his hands out, one palm facing the audience, the other towards his guests.

  ‘Please.’ Silence fell at once.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Ali noticed one of the cameras rolling silently towards her.

  ‘Mary, you said back there that no-one could understand what Alison had been through, and Alison herself said a curious thing. You said you thought things like this happen all the time. Last week wasn’t the first time you’ve seen this kind of tragedy, was it? Is that why it matters so much to you?’

  Ali looked at Mary, but Mary was just staring back at her, waiting. She remembered Sean O’Loan talking to Mary at the Shelbourne. Her mother must have told Sean what had happened in Buleen. She wouldn’t discuss it with her own daughter, but she had told Sean.

  ‘Is there anything you can tell us about that?’ Gay was in touching distance now.

  The camera moved a little closer. There was a red light beside the lens, just like a little warning. She thought of all the people beyond that lens, watching her. Aunt Una and the rest them at the farmhouse.

  ‘I was six… I can’t really remember.’

  But that was a lie. The memories were turning up in force now, pressing their noses against the glass, wanting to be let in.

 

  ‘God help me, I’m a dreadful mother.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Davy, ‘He’s talking about what happened at the farm. Isn’t he?’

  Ali’s face stretched across the old black and white screen at the foot of Deirdre Hogan’s bed.

  I was six… I can’t really remember. Ali’s voice as thin as wire from the little speaker.

  Gay moved the discussion back to Mary O’Shea, then rounded it up without going back to Ali. As the cameras drew back for the end shot they could see she was looking at her knees, not up at the cameras like the others.

  ‘She was so excited to go on – I should have stopped her.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t.’ Davy got up from the little armchair draped in clothes, and leaned over the end of the bed to reach the set. ‘Do you want me to turn it off?’

  ‘No, just turn the sound down a bit.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have told that policeman,’ he said with his face turned from her. He heard her sigh,

  ‘Well it was just so weird, you know, happening again. You remember it, don’t you?’

  ‘Not much…’

  ‘Ach, you were practically a child yourself.’

  ‘I was sixteen.’

  Davy left his sister to her regrets and went down to the big sparse room he’d been using as his own. He pulled a suitcase from under the single bed. It was an old case that Una had turned up from somewhere in the farmhouse, made out of cardboardy stuff and reinforced with metal corners and clasps, sandy with corrosion. He dragged a pile of his things out of a corner cupboard, started throwing them into the case.

  Dublin wasn’t far enough, that was the problem. Things hadn’t worked out this time, but once he had some money, he could do it properly, go further. A fresh start. He snapped the clasps shut.

  The only thing left in the cupboard was that cheap bottle of whiskey, plenty left. He grabbed it and spun the top off with a swipe of his hand. He remembered that Christmas all right, much better than his sister ever could.

 

  The farmhouse had been full to bursting. Una’s four kids were home from school, and Deirdre and Ali were staying with them since Ciaran’s funeral. The only peace he could get was late at night. He’d go down to the kitchen, drink a coffee, listen to the big radio. He could tune in to a foreign station and pretend he was somewhere else – somewhere with pavement cafés, jazz clubs and cobbled streets, not a boghole in the middle of nowhere.

  On Christmas Eve, h
e’d gone downstairs at about two. The light over the range was on as usual. There were presents for the kids on the table, some wrapped, some not. He didn’t even notice her at first. He filled the kettle at the tap and stepped over the dog on the way to the range.

  ‘You get up on the sofa, boy, I’ll tell no-one.’

  But the dog stayed where he was, his eyes fixed on the heap of rugs on the sofa, like he was scared of it, his tail sweeping slowly across the flagstones, gathering crumbs. The heap gave a groan and Davy nearly jumped out of his skin. A glob of water hopped from the kettle spout and hissed on the hotplate.

  He was annoyed. He couldn’t have his peace with her sleeping there. Why couldn’t she go home? She groaned again, deep like a cow lowing, and the dog moved a step closer, keeping his belly to the floor.

  She must have heard him, but wouldn’t let on, her face turned to the sofa back. When he’d asked her about her condition before, asked her straight, she’d denied it, wearing a big man’s jumper to cover it, struggling to bend or rise.

  He took the dog by the scruff and led him out to his kennel in the yard. Then he stood by the kitchen window and looked back in at her. She threw the blanket off after a time, and he could see everything; the sweat on her, the strain in her bare legs. It was a cold night and he wasn’t dressed for it, but he couldn’t go back in. The moon gleamed off the pig shed roofs and frost whitened the upper field.

  Eventually she heaved herself off the sofa and squatted beside it, hanging on to the arm, looking down into herself. She was huffing and grunting, the hair plastered to her skull. Somewhere in the middle of it she turned her head and looked at the window, looked right through him.

  He remembered the awful streaks of blood on her haunches as something bulged and slithered from them and onto the dirty rug she had put beneath her. She was bent over the mite, arse in the air, pulling at the cord that joined them. He saw a puny arm rise from the rug, trembling with anger was what it looked like, shaking its little knot of fist in the air, and he felt exultant, something bursting in his chest, coming from nothing and filling him full.

  NINE

  When Ali got to the bus stop outside the RTE studio there was already a group of people gathered there. Several turned to look at her.

  ‘Don’t they drop you home in a limo?’ said one women.

  They were from the audience. Ali looked at her watch and walked away from the bus stop as if she simply didn’t have the time to wait. Maybe there really was a limo – she hadn’t stayed around to find out. Now she’d have to walk home.

  She could hardly believe how her mouth had run away with her. Imagine talking about sex like she knew what she was on about. She had had sex. A couple of times, but it wasn’t what she thought it would be, it was clumsy and mystifying, not the transformative experience she had been expecting.

  Ali turned up Eglington Road, limping in her high heels now, but half way home. A car drove by slowly and came to a halt in front of her, its brake lights glowing. She moved closer to the houses on her left and looked away from the car as she passed it. She heard it start up again but thankfully it just continued off up the road. She remembered the heavy makeup she was still wearing. The heels, no coat – she must look a sight. She stopped and unbuckled the straps of her shoes. Better barefoot than hobbled. She kept her eyes on the pavement ahead for streams of liquid or glints of glass.

  Why had her mother never discussed the first baby with her, never tried to explain things, let her believe it was in her head? Her aunt and uncle, they had seen it too, but no one could speak of it. Someone must know who that baby was, where it came from. She recalled how her mother lay in bed all day, upstairs in the farmhouse, crying and crying, the curtains closed.

  ‘You okay?’

  Ali was standing at the edge of the pavement, waiting for the lights to change. She might have been standing for some time. A girl was stepping onto the crossing, hand in hand with a sullen man. She craned her neck to look back at Ali.

  ‘Okay?’ she asked again, and her boyfriend tugged her onwards, away from involvement.

  ‘Fine…’ Ali managed, and trotted across behind them.

  She was glad to see the pool of light that fell on the pavement from the all-night shop. Her home was behind the shop. After her father died, Ma sold their little house and bought a property full of sitting tenants and with a shop out front for rent. It was the practical thing to do, she explained. When her mother told her their new house had a shop in its front garden, Ali imagined it as some kind of little striped kiosk in the middle of a green lawn. What her mother should have said was that there was a shop instead of a front garden. She walked up the narrow passage at the shop side and into a small yard filled with bread trays and stacks of flattened boxes. The house rose like a cliff in front of her, stone steps leading up to the front door. Above it, her mother’s bedroom light shone through the gap in her curtains.

  Ali opened and shut the front door quietly. There were no signs of life downstairs, but she could hear the muffled sound of the television above. She went up.

  Her mother’s room was large, stretching across the front of the house. It functioned as a workroom as well as a bedroom, now that her mother had taken up mending china as another way to make a bit of money. A huge dining table filled one side of the room, covered with broken things – dishes, vases, a large statue of the Child Of Prague, and dozens of ornaments missing vital pieces. Saucers of glue and paint sat along the edge, wooden sticks and brushes bristled from jam jars.

  On the other side was her mother’s ornate bed, hemmed in by small tables toppling with book, draped chairs and screens, lamps, and in the middle of it all, like a hen on her nest, her hair loose over her shoulders, her mother waited.

  Ali sat on the edge of the bed. A film with subtitles was playing on the TV; a beautiful woman in a tight shift dress leant smoking against a wall while a man remonstrated with her. Ali promised herself a cigarette once she’d got this over with.

  ‘You watched it, I presume.’

  ‘Your dress looked nice…’ said Ma.

  ‘Jesus, my dress?’

  Ma looked away, blinked quickly. Ali took a deep breath, tried to keep her voice steady.

  ‘You told Sean O’Loan, didn’t you? About what happened in Buleen.’

  ‘I was upset that night. It just came out. I’m sorry. And I should have stopped you going on that.’ Her mother pointed at the television.

  ‘You have to tell me about it, Ma.’

  ‘I wasn’t even sure you remembered, you never mention it.’

  After all these years, they were talking about it. The thing that couldn’t be spoken of was out in the world.

  ‘It was your baby wasn’t it?

  ‘What – No!

  ‘It would have been my brother or sister.’

  Her mother put a quick hand to Ali’s shoulder.

  ‘Really, it wasn’t. God, things were bad enough, but no, not that. I can’t believe you thought that.’

  Ali looked back at her.

  ‘Then who?’

  Ma hesitated.

  ‘I always presumed it was Joan’s – do you remember Joan? Its funny, I never even asked Una about it. It was such an odd time. All I could think of was losing your father – I’d nothing to spare for someone else’s troubles.’

  Ali cast her mind back to Joan, who cooked the meals at her uncle’s farm. Freckle-faced Joan, who was timid in company but so funny when the two of them were alone in that big kitchen, Joan who sang songs about bathtubs and farting, who showed her how to roll out pastry, and let her mark the cross on the brown bread before it went into the range.

  Ali stood up and wandered over to the work table. She picked up a little Bambi-like fawn that was lying on its side, four delicate broken legs sticking out rigidly from its white spotted belly.

  Her mother reached for the g
lass on her bedside table. ‘She came from an odd family, you know. I’m not sure what went on there. I’d no idea she was expecting. She still comes to the farm sometimes, Una says, looking for her job back – though she’s been in and out of hospital mostly. Psychiatric.’

  ‘Because of what happened to her baby?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She was always a bit not there, a bit wandering. I really did think you’d forgotten.’

  Ali balanced the fawn gently on its stumps so that it appeared to be wading lopsided through the polished grain of the tabletop. A little oval base lay nearby with four matchstick hooves protruding from it, tiny blades of grass painted about them.

  ‘Some of these things have been here forever,’ said Ali, ‘If you can’t mend them, you should get rid of them.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Ma, ‘what’s all this about you campaigning for better sex education?’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’

  ‘Or more contraception or something.’

  ‘I looked like a right fool.’

  ‘No, love, not at all.’

  They lapsed into silence. A raucous burst of Italian came from the TV. Ali lifted her eyes. A young man was being chased through a market but he was laughing as he ran. She wanted to run with him.

  ‘Mary O’Shea wants me to go on her radio show.’

  Her mother tilted her head, then quickly shook it. ‘I’m not sure that’s –‘

  ‘I don’t want to – I’m never going to leave the house again.’

  ‘That’s a bit melodramatic.’

  Ali picked up the little Bambi figure and laid it on its side once more. She ran her finger down the sharp chalky edge of a broken soup tureen.

  ‘Don’t!’ said Ma. ‘I did buy you that doll, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The doll you were looking for. Baby Tears or whatever it was called, but I couldn’t find it to wrap it for you. I thought I was going mad… well, I was going mad, those days.